Tom Bailey's Blog

Monday, 21 August 2017

The astute choice of a
character’s name is something we, as readers, cherish in literature. We only
have to recall Dickens’s villains to see how important a name can be in the
depiction of a certain personality – the name Ebenezer Scrooge (A Christmas Carol), for example, with
its harsh consonants, immediately hints at unkindness and cruelty, whilst the
name Verneering (Our Mutual Friend) at
once reveals a sense of superficiality and an obsession with ostentation. When
dwelling on the importance of names in literature, we may also recall Virginia
Woolf’s feminist novel A Room of One’s
Own, the heroine of which is never fully identified apart from as ‘Mary’.
Given that this name was, at the time, the most common female name, this naming
sets her forth as a universal figure of feminine life. This tradition of the
precise selecting of names partly stems back to Medieval morality plays, in
which the characters each represent a particular virtue or vice and are named
accordingly: in the anonymously-written, archetypal morality play, Everyman, the protagonist is surrounded
by characters like ‘Good-Deeds’, ‘Beauty’, ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Strength’.
Arguably, it was this tradition that Ben Jonson drew on in the skilled naming
of his characters: though their names can be easily overlooked, his specific
choices often emphasise particular aspects of his satirical writing. In his
three most famous comedies, Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, Jonson uses names to exemplify the idiosyncrasies
of his characters before we have even met them, and it is often the naming of
his characters that drives his satire or elucidates his plots.

The naming of characters in
Volpone is the simplest manifestation
of this phenomenon. In the play, Jonson draws directly on the medieval fabliaux
tradition and, as Michael Jamieson points out, ‘The people of the play are,
through their names, invested with animal symbolism…’ The play is set in
Venice, a city which was, to the Elizabethans, seen as a hub of corruption –
many audience members would recall the usury of Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. The name Volpone, in
Italian, literally means ‘sly fox’, and thus the protagonist comes to represent
this corruption – his manipulative scheming (evident in his comic asides), like
that of Subtle, Face, and Doll in The
Alchemist, comes straight out of the cony-catching pamphlets of the Early
Modern period. The other characters are likewise elucidated by their names:
Corbaccio (‘the raven’), Voltore (‘the vulture’) and Corvino (‘the crow’) are
all carrion-eating fowl, hungry not for flesh but for the wealth of the play’s
protagonist. This animalism is so extreme that Corvino, for instance, commits
to disinheriting his son and prostituting his wife. But this is Jonson’s name
choosing at its most simple. More interesting are characters like Sir Politic
Would-Be, whose name gives away his role as the ridiculous Englishman abroad,
vainly attempting to be politic and sensible, an endeavour in which he fails
miserably. Indeed, he is so absurd that he notes in his diary every single
action he performs (including urination) during each day, and he
characteristically ends the play hiding in a tortoise shell, the victim of one
of Peregrine’s clever pranks. Thus, we can see how his name goes towards a
satire of the ignorant English traveller, his mind filled with extravagant and
bizarre business ideas with which he bores characters and audience alike. Likewise,
the name ‘Littlewit’ is ironically telling, making the opening scene of Bartholomew Fair all the more humorous. This
garrulous amateur dramatist is infatuated with his own negligible intelligence,
constantly endeavouring to present himself as a witty and clever orator. For
example, when Winwife employs some relatively clichéd metaphors
(‘strawberry-breath, cherry-lips, apricot-cheeks, and a soft velvet head’),
Littlewit ironically cannot restrain his admiration: ‘that I had not that
before him, that I should not light on’t as well as he! Velvet head!’ Justice
Overdo’s name is similarly revealing of his character, predicting the
exaggeration and self-satisfied nature of his speeches: ‘Now to my enormities:
look upon me, O London! and see me, O Smithfield! The example of justice, and
mirror of magistrates, the true top of formality, and scourge of enormity.
Hearken unto my labours…!’ He, along with the Puritan Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land
Busy, is just one of the many bourgeois characters of this carnivalesque play
whose pretensions to honour, authority and religiosity are mocked by Jonson
(who, of course, loathed the Puritans for their critique of the theatre), and
it is the naming of these characters that contributes to Jonson’s mockery.

Similar naming techniques are used in one of Jonson’s
other satirical comedies, The Alchemist.
Sir Epicure Mammon is one of the ‘gulls’ hoping to get rich from Subtle’s
feigned magical skill. The name Epicure refers to the Ancient Greek philosopher
Epicurus, famed for an emphasis on sensual pleasure (though this depiction of
his philosophy is somewhat inaccurate and exaggerated). The name Mammon is also
suggestive, meaning ‘wealth regarded as an evil influence or false object
of worship or devotion’. To an extent, then, the name Epicure Mammon is
oxymoronic – though his forename implies an emphasis on material and physical
existence, his surname seems to refute that, again showing how Jonson uses
names to mock certain characters. So it’s no wonder that a character with such
a name is so obsessed with the wealth and material riches that he hopes to
acquire, which he boasts about to Doll: he shall have ‘glasses
/ Cut in more subtle angles, to disperse / And multiply the figures, as I walk
/ Naked between my succubæ.’

Even more witty a
choice of name is the name adopted by Jeremy the Butler, who refers to himself
as Captain Face whilst he is operating as a member of London’s criminal
underworld. The name alone suggests the adoption of a mask, though we don’t
find out until Act V that his real name is Jeremy. As Jonathan Haynes points
out, ‘All traces of origin are effaced’ by Face’s ‘constant and impeccable
role-playing.’ Thus, Face is an ‘impostor’, one of many corrupt characters
lurking in London’s underworld: as the Prologue explains, ‘No clime breeds
better matter, for your whore, / Bawd, squire, impostor, many persons more.’
(lines 7-8) At the end of the play, though, Face is unmasked. And yet, he is,
to some extent, the victor of the play. He is so manipulative and skilful that
Lovewit’s neighbours think ‘Jeremie / Is a very honest fellow…’ Moreover, as
the name Lovewit would imply, Face’s master appreciates his wit and scheming
intellect, and thus Face can use his wit to gain his master’s pardon:

‘Give me but leave to
make the best of my fortune,

And only pardon me
thi' abuse of your house:

It's all I beg. I'll
help you to a widow,

In recompense, that
you shall give me thanks for…’

Hence, at the end of the play, Lovewit pays tribute
to his servant’s ingenuity: he is ‘very grateful’ to have ‘received such
happiness by a servant.’ It’s no surprise that a character called Lovewit would
feel obliged to be ‘A little indulgent to that servant’s wit,’ and thus again
we can see how Jonson’s use of naming helps not only to illustrate his characters,
but to develop and almost foreshadow the plot. And though Lovewit is the
eventual winner of the play (gaining a wife and augmented wealth), Face
certainly ends up better off than his two scheming companions Subtle and Doll,
who are forced to flee once the master of the house arrives unexpectedly. Face
is what was known in the Renaissance period as a ‘taker-up’:

‘The taker-up
seemeth a skilful man in all things, who hath by long travail learned without
book a thousand policies to insinuate himself into a man’s acquaintance. Talk
of matters in law, he hath plenty of cases at his fingers’ ends, and he hath
seen, and tried, and ruled in the King’s courts. Speak of grazing and
husbandry, no more knowether more shires than he, nor better way to raise a
gainful commodity, and how the abuses and overture of prices might be
redressed.’ – Greene, Notable Discovery

Face can use his wit to
adopt multiple different personalities (hence the name ‘Face’, establishing his
use of masks) – as Haynes explains, ‘Everyone is spoken to in his own
language.’ He can talk to Drugger about tobacco, he can talk to Dapper about
his milieu, all the while ready to transform back into Jeremy the Butler. Thus,
the barrier between the criminal underworld and straight society becomes
permeable for him, whilst it is not for Subtle and Doll. In this sense, Face
can be seen as a warning to Elizabethan theatre-goers, his character
demonstrating the Trump-like deceptions and manipulations not only of the
criminal underworld, but of society in general.

We must remember, though,
how aware Jonson was of the dangers of satire – he was, after all, arrested and
imprisoned more than once for his satirical work. One of his most interesting
satirical works, Poetaster, works
completely differently in terms of naming. Jonson’s play sets out, amongst
other things, to revenge the criticism he had received from Marston, Dekker and
others during the so-called ‘War of the Theatres’ or Poetomachia. But, as he explains in his Apologetical Dialogue, he
aims to ‘spare the persons and to speak the vices’. By setting his play in
Augustan Rome rather than in London, Jonson champions his own style of Horatian
satire (or, at least, the style of poetry to which he aspires), while
criticising the Juvenalian satire of Marston and Dekker (though, in bitterly
attacking these two playwrights as ‘vile ibids’ in the Apologetical Dialogue,
Jonson was hypocritically sinking to the Juvenalian level) – thus, the play can
be seen as a general satire of the poetaster figure whilst also criticising
Jonson’s rivals. The loathsome Crispinus is often read as a representation of
Marston – towards the end of the play, Crispinus vomits up what Tom Cain refers
to as a series of ‘Marstonisms’, a pretentious and bombastic lexical flood
including words like ‘retrograde’, ‘incubus’, ‘glibbery’, ‘magnificate’ and
more. Moreover, the two poems that Crispinus and Demetrius read are undeniable
parodies of Marston and Dekker’s work. But still, by choosing not to name
Marston in the play, Jonson arguably escapes accusations of Juvenalian, bitter
satire.

By (uncharacteristically)
avoiding the use of illuminating names, Jonson is also able to compare himself
to the great Augustan poet Horace, ‘a self-projection of Jonson’ according to
Tom Cain. After all, the two poets were indeed very similar – Horace was often
taunted because his father was a freed slave, and Jonson was acutely
self-conscious of his step-father’s profession as a brick-layer; Horace had
fought in Philippi, Jonson fought in the Low Countries. To an extent, then,
Jonson seems to be modelling himself on Horace: in fact, in his Discoveries Jonson advocated exactly
that: the ability ‘to bee able to convert the substance, or Riches of an other Poet, to his owne use.’ Thomas Smith
even praised Jonson as ‘the elaborate English Horace,’ and like Horace, Jonson
often chose to write in a realist style, ‘out of use and experience’ (Discoveries). Thus, Jonson could
implicitly compare himself to the great Augustan satirist in an attempt to
elevate his style.

There are other comparisons
in Poetaster that also ought not to
be ignored. The play opens with Ovid composing a poem which turns out to be one
of Marlowe’s own translations of Ovid, lines from a banned edition published
with Sir John Davies’s epigrams. Marlowe was one of the most loved poets of the
day, and Jonson clearly respected him, though Marlowe does not completely
escape criticism – compared to the virtues of Virgil and Horace, Ovid is seen
as sensuous and arguably blasphemous in his organisation of the Divine Banquet
(this, again, would link the Ovid character to Marlowe, who was often accused of
blasphemy and atheism, and whose play Dr
Faustus presents us with a similarly blasphemous banquet scene in Rome). So
by presenting Ovid in such a way that we can’t help thinking of Marlowe, Jonson
was able to express his opinions without fear of danger – Thomas More arguably
used a similar technique in Utopia,
hiding his own beliefs from the reader. Thus, the banishment of Ovid could be
compared to the death of Marlowe, and as Tom Cain writes, ‘The Ovid being
rejected is as much the Ovid of the 1590s in England [i.e. Marlowe and poets
who wrote in a similar vein] as the historical Ovid of Augustan Rome.’ Finally,
by setting the play in Rome, Jonson could make a subtle contrast and criticism
between the high regard poets were held in under Augustus’s rule, and their
relatively harsh treatment in Elizabethan England. It is poets that guide the
Emperor Augustus in Jonson’s play, whilst it was libel and informers (like
Tucca) that drove the Essex Rebellion of 1601, the year Jonson’s play was first
performed.

So it’s clear that names
played a huge role in Ben Jonson’s dramatic work. In his later comedies, he
used names to elucidate and expound the personalities of certain characters
whilst also satirising or ironizing them, whilst in the earlier Poetaster he deliberately avoids the
direct naming of his subjects (if we can go so far as to say for sure that
Jonson was attempting to satirise Marston and Dekker, amongst others). It is
Histrio’s plays that directly mock and bitterly attack individuals: Ben Jonson,
posing as the virtuous Horace, suggests he will not wrong ‘men’s fames’ (Trebatius’s
words) in his verse. The implication is that Jonson (as Horace), along with
Virgil (whom some critics have claimed resembles Chapman), is aloof from that,
though it is doubtful whether he really is. Whatever the answer, it’s clear
that Jonson thought very carefully about the choice of names in his plays, and
through those names he makes his comedies and satires all the more powerful. As
Haynes argues, Jonson used his art ‘in
society as a weapon, or tool, or organ.’ Whether it was mocking the folly
of naïve bourgeois figures like Cokes or Littlewit; whether it was revealing
and revelling in the dark scheming of the criminal underworld; whether it was critiquing
Early Modern nascent capitalism; or whether it was responding to the attacks of
other poets, Jonson made the naming of characters an expressive tool in his
work, carrying on and expanding earlier traditions, and influencing the work of
writers who came after him.

Sunday, 20 August 2017

In his poem ‘Jordan’,
George Herbert criticises the convoluted nature of Renaissance poetry and urges
poets towards straightforward expressions of emotion, particularly religious
emotion. He questions ‘Is there in truth no beauty?’ and opens the poem’s third
stanza with the memorable line: ‘Shepherds are honest people; let them sing…’
With the pastoral reference and the use of the word ‘honest’, Herbert also
seems to be condemning the insincerity of 17th Century courtly life
contrasted with a sense of rustic innocence. John Donne himself was acutely
aware of this artificiality, evident in his sonnet ‘Oh, to vex me…’ (often
printed as the last sonnet in the sequence) in which he reveals the variety of
masks he adopts in his poetry. He questions whether he can really demonstrate
the real truth of his soul ‘By circumstances, and by signes that be / Apparent
in us…’ He looks back at his past and sees only a succession of
skilfully-adopted poses: ‘to day
/ In prayers, and flattering speaches I court God: / To morrow I quake with
true feare of his rod.’ He showed a similar awareness in his sermons, as when
he discussed the dangers of rhetoric and the power of words ‘to shape that
beliefe’ and ‘to powre it into new molds… to stamp and imprint new formes, new
images, new opinions in it.’ In his Holy
Sonnets, Donne does exactly that: he uses his poetic skill to shape various
different identities for himself.

Indeed, Donne’s whole life seems to have been divided into a dual
identity. A clear split has been forged between the young and lustful Donne of
the Songs and Sonnets and the old and
devout Donne of the Divine Poems.
This division was partly driven by the mature Donne’s desire to distance
himself from the sensuousness of his early poetry, a distance reinforced by
Izaak Walton’s biography of Donne, in which he compared the poet to a
latter-day Augustine, the saint whose conversion at the hands of St. Ambrose
became an influential Christian paradigm. But this division is unhelpful in a
number of ways, not least because it is based on the false assumption that the
religious poems were written much later than the Songs and Sonnets, an assumption with very little evidence to
support it. Moreover, the poems themselves undermine the so-called ‘myth of two
Donnes’ in that, throughout the Holy
Sonnets, we see the same wit and performance for which the Songs and Sonnets are renowned. As P.M.
Oliver points out, ‘Donne’s religious writing… demonstrates a striking
continuity with the amatory and satirical verse he had already written.’ True,
the matter of the religious poems may be different, but their manner and style
are very similar. Like the love poems, the divine poems are often ‘witty,
individualistic performances.’ This does, however, leave us with some problems:
the idiosyncratic wit and rhetorical skill of the poet often undermines the
masks he is attempting to adopt, and to that extent the authenticity of emotion
in the Holy Sonnets must be called
into question.

Donne adopts two major poses in the
Holy Sonnets: the first is that of the submissive and despairing sinner,
terrified that his transgressions will lead to his damnation. The second mask
he adopts is that of a man assured of his own election, unafraid and almost
swaggering. The first mask, that of fear, despair, and melancholy, is typical
of devotional verse: Gerard Manley Hopkins adopted a similar personality in his
‘Terrible Sonnets’. The melancholy pose was also typical of the Renaissance
man, hence the abundance of young men painted as forlorn youths tortured by
unrequited love. Donne himself had one of these portraits commissioned in which
he is depicted in darkness with his arms folded – a standard symbol of
melancholy – and a large-brimmed hat shading his face. Just as he adopted this
pose as a pitiful lover, so in the Holy
Sonnets he adopts the pose of pitiful sinner. For example, the fourth
sonnet opens with the impassioned exclamation: ‘Oh my black Soule!’ and ends
with the embracing of a mournful pose: ‘Oh make thy selfe with holy mourning
blacke, / And red with blushing, as thou art with sinne…’ His repentance, then,
seems to be a mask in itself, and thus we can infer that the poem’s opening
exclamation is no more than an artificiality. Indeed, a number of the poems
seem to come across as theatrical and dramatic representations rather than
sincere expressions of despair. In her introduction to the divine poems, Helen
Gardner notes this ‘almost histrionic note’ and attributes it to ‘the
meditation’s deliberate stimulation of emotion.’ The emotions of the poems seem
almost fabricated at points, as is suggested by the repetition of ‘oh’ and
‘alas’ in the sequence. These exclamations seem particularly out of context when
they follow relatively collected and rational meditations, as in ‘Father, part
of his double interest…’ After meditating on the doctrine of the Bible and the
various commandments God has given, Donne exclaims: ‘thy last command / Is all
but love; Oh let this last Will stand!’ The ‘oh’ makes it seem like the speaker
is emotionally involved, but as Oliver points out, ‘the level rationality of
the preceding lines’ makes it hard to see the speaker as ‘desperate or
hysterical.’

There are similarly histrionic notes in the Songs and Sonnets, again showing why the amatory-religious divide
is unhelpful. For example, in ‘The Flea’, when his mistress has crushed the
flea with her nail, Donne melodramatically exclaims: ‘Cruel and sudden, hast
thou since / Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?’ Here, Donne is adopting
a tone of sadness in order to inspire the pity of his mistress. Arguably, the Holy Sonnets use a similar tactic,
attempting to inspire the pity of God through a pose of despair which often
comes across as melodramatic. ‘This is my play’s last scene’ opens very
sensationally, with the word ‘last’ repeated four times in the first four lines
alone. It’s no wonder, then, that Gardner pointed out the ‘note of
exaggeration’ which, ‘in stimulating feeling… may falsify it, and overdramatize
the spiritual life.’ But this melodrama is not the only aspect of the Songs and Sonnets which has crept into
the religious verse. Throughout the divine poems there are idiosyncratic
paradoxes, conceits and puns which, though typical of Donne, seem somewhat out
of place in devout religious poetry. For example, in ‘A Hymne to God the
Father’, Donne mourns his sinfulness with an authentic voice of fear and
despair: ‘Wilt thou forgive that sinne where I begunne, / Which was my sin,
though it were done before?’ And yet, the first two stanzas end with a
paradoxical pun on his name, jarring with the serious tone of the previous
lines: ‘When thou hast done, thou hast not done, / For, I have more.’ This
mixture of wit and gloom is something that Wilbur Sanders criticised in the Holy Sonnets as a flaw, though perhaps
it shows the tension in Donne between a yearning towards seriousness and an
inability to completely escape his jocular self. Hence, in the words of
Sanders, ‘the personality becomes the prey of inner division.’

This seems to be the underlying flaw of many of the sonnets: though at
times they present us with an apparently sincere sense of grief, fear and
despair, this is often counteracted by a strange frivolity, as when he plays
verbal games with colours at the end of ‘Oh my black Soule!’ Their other major
drawback is that they are often dominated by what Sanders calls ‘blatant
theological sophistry.’ This is no more evident than in ‘What if this present
were the world’s last night?’ In the octet, the speaker focuses on the picture
of Christ crucified and wonders whether Christ will ‘adjudge thee unto hell’
even though he ‘pray’d forgivenesse for his foes’. The sestet opens with a
direct response: ‘No, no…’ This audacity in itself is odd, and somewhat hard to
believe: perhaps Donne used his poetry as a method of self-assurance. He then
argues that the beauty of Christ’s image on the cross ‘assumes a pitious mind.’
But Donne, as a Calvinist, knew that this could not be true, since Christ could
not be merciful to everybody: the elect would receive God’s pity, whilst the
non-elect would feel his wrath and eventually be damned. Indeed, Universalism
(the theory that everybody could be saved) was condemned as a heresy in
Constantinople in 553 and again at the Protestant Augsburg Confession of 1530,
and so it’s incredibly unlikely that Donne could have believed this sophistic
argument. Thus, Christ’s image cannot assure pity for everybody. Moreover,
Donne’s reference to his idolatrous past is telling since, as Stanley Fish
points out, ‘The assertion that he is not
now in his idolatry is undermined by the fact that he here says the same
things he used to say when he was.’ So it’s clear, then, that as Sanders says,
‘the consolation does not console’ – Donne’s verbal ability to assure himself
of his safety seems to undermine itself, revealing his manifest casuistry. Fish
goes on: ‘as the poem concludes, he is no more assured of what he assumes than
anyone else, neither of the ‘piteous minde’ of his saviour, nor of the
spiritual stability he looks to infer from the saviour’s picture.’

The same can be said for Donne’s famous sonnet ‘Death be not proud’.
Throughout his life, Donne was obsessed with the idea of death: as a young
Catholic in Protestant England, he was taken to see Catholics martyred, an
experience that stayed with him into his elderly years. He also wrote tracts on
the morality of suicide, and, most famously, is said by Walton to have
‘preached his own Funeral Sermon’ known as ‘Death’s Duel’, a sermon he gave in
the final days of his life. He was terrified by the idea that death takes away
our individual essence as humans:

‘[T]hat private and retired man, that thought himself
his own for ever, and never came forth, must in his dust of the grave be
published, and (such are the revolutions of the grave) be mingled with the dust
of every highway and of every dunghill, and swallowed in every puddle and pond.
This is the most inglorious and contemptible vilification, the most deadly and
peremptory nullification of man, that we can consider.’ (‘Death’s Duel’)

In the sermon, he defeats this fear by concluding that every man must
‘lie down in peace in his grave, till he vouchsafe you a resurrection…’ The
sonnet ‘Death be not proud…’ follows a similar line, though it is much more
bravado in its argument. He addresses personified mortality as ‘poore death’
and bravely says: ‘nor yet canst thou kill mee…’ Death, he says, is ‘slave to
Fate’ and asks ‘why swell’st thou then?’ This question in itself, though, supposes
that death still assumes a large portion of Donne’s thought, swelling beyond
reason into an irrational fear. The poem ends with a theatrical and yet hollow
flourish: ‘death shall be no more, death, thou shalt die’. Despite the bravado
of this statement, Donne’s declaration is vacuous – as John Stachniewski argues,
the fact that it ends with the word ‘die’ ironically demonstrates that death
still has power in the poem. Similarly, when Donne says ‘valiantly I hels wide
mouth o’rstride’ we see him adopting a peculiarly audacious stance resonating
with the precarious assertiveness of ‘Death be not proud’. Thus, whilst these
sophistic arguments may have worked in seducing mistresses with wit and humour,
they seem incredibly out of place in an eschatological context of salvation or
damnation. They may show Donne’s poetic and rhetorical skill, but as Fish
notes, ‘The effort of self-persuasion… fails in exactly the measure that his
rhetorical effort succeeds.’

In his poem ‘Metempsychosis’ Donne reflects upon the stretching of
‘reasons… to so nice a thinness through a quill / That they themselves break,
do themselves spill…’ This stretching of reason is frequently dramatized in the
Holy Sonnets, the strength of the
sophistic arguments often driven to a ludicrous extent, revealing their
weakness. But this is not to say that the poems themselves are weak: this may
have been part of Donne’s intention. Perhaps the meaning of the poems is to be
found in their note of feigned assurance. As Stachniewski suggests, ‘the
argument of Donne’s poems is often so strained that it alerts us to its
opposite, the emotion or mental state in defiance of which the argumentative
process was set to work. The poem’s meaning lives in the tension between the
argument and the emotion.’ Perhaps in ‘This is my playes last scene’ we are not
meant to believe with such assurance that Donne’s sins will fall away to Hell
whilst he goes up to Heaven. We are, perhaps, urged to question this argument.
And so, this self-conscious casuistry is a subtle and effective way of
establishing the poetry’s dominant emotions, doubt and fear.

It’s clear, then, that Donne’s poetic style largely stayed with him
throughout his career. The same use of wit and paradox can be seen in the Holy Sonnets as was seen in the Songs and Sonnets. It’s also clear that
Donne’s poetry is largely a succession of poses, and this is something he
himself seems to have been aware of. The sonnets often begin with a pose of
despair and then move onto a pose of self-assured certainty. It’s no wonder,
really, that the pose of despairing sinner seems, as Gardner says,
‘exaggerated’ to the modern reader given that we no longer live in a country
dominated by Calvinism and the fear of God’s wrath – perhaps, then, we can look
past this histrionic note as understandable. Moreover, perhaps this tone of
feigned emotion simply demonstrates the impossibility of expressing such strong
feeling in words. It’s somewhat harder to excuse the strange use of wit and
paradox, which seems to undermine Donne’s apparent despair, revealing it to be
just a pose (though that’s not to say he never felt despair, just to say that
the despair expressed in the sonnets comes across as somewhat feigned). Similarly,
the paradoxical sophistry destabilises any sense of self-assurance and comfort,
revealing the mask of boldness adopted by the poet. But, as I argued earlier,
perhaps this sense of failed assurance was intentional. Though Donne forces his
fierce emotions into the restricted sonnet form, and though he apparently
attempts to mitigate his despair with theological sophistry which he surely
cannot fail to doubt, other emotions inevitably seep out. Just as the
highly-wrought passions of ‘Batter my heart…’ seem almost to break free from
the strict rhyme scheme and metre (the initial trochee ‘Batter’ being an
obvious example), so the despair of the other Holy Sonnets is never really soothed. Perhaps Donne was partly
right when he said: ‘Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, / For, he
tames it, who fetters it in verse.’ But, as we read the sonnets, we get the
sense that Donne never truly succeeded in ‘taming’ his grief and his fear
completely. Each line is bursting with tension, uncertainty, and doubt, and it
is this that gives the sonnets their excitement.

Thursday, 17 August 2017

Whilst Marlowe was writing,
anti-Semitism was rife across the entirety of Europe. The Renaissance period
saw the rise of increasingly xenophobic, anti-Jewish fears somewhat comparable
to the prejudice against Islam in the Western world today, fed on and augmented
by President Trump. We only have to look at the work of the so-called Old Masters
to see how widespread these anti-Semitic sentiments really were. Not only were
Jesus and his followers stripped of their Jewish identity and transformed into
anachronistically Christian figures, but also, on the rare occasion that Jews
were actually depicted in Renaissance art, their portrayal was far from
complimentary. Albrecht Durer’s Jesus
Among the Doctors is a case in point: the Jew that stands to the right of
Jesus is almost caricature-like with his grotesque grin and hooked nose. Given
the pervasiveness of this anti-Semitism, it’s no wonder that Marlowe’s Barabas
is likewise presented according to the bigoted values of the age. He is, in
fact, a complete caricature of the selfish and cruel Jew. And yet, what’s
interesting about Marlowe’s play The Jew
of Malta is that Jews are not the only group to receive criticism. Indeed,
almost every religious group, Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, seem to be at
the receiving end of Marlowe’s reproach. This can be said for the majority of
Marlowe’s work, much of which is dedicated to the analysis and condemnation of
religious doctrine and hypocrisy. So, with reference to Marlowe’s work and in
particular The Jew of Malta, I intend
to explore Marlowe’s views on religion as presented through his plays.

I must, of course, begin
this essay with an analysis of the loathsome and Machiavellian character of Barabas.
The prologue of the play, delivered by Niccolò Machiavelli himself, describes
how Barabas ‘smiles to see how full his bags are crammed, / Which money was not
got without my means.’ Immediately, then, he is presented as a typical machiavelle figure of Renaissance drama,
characterised by the same scheming villainy encapsulated by Iago (Othello) and Edmund (King Lear) in Shakespeare’s plays. The
words ‘my means’ refers to the philosophy set out by Machiavelli in his famous
work Il Principe – a proto-self-help
book preaching expediency over morality and the appearance over the reality of
virtue. Barabas fills this role perfectly, almost all of his actions recalling
Satan’s words in Book 4 of Milton’s Paradise
Lost: ‘Evil be thou my Good.’ For example, he distances himself from the
man with a conscience who ‘for his conscience lives in beggary.’ It is by acting
without a conscience, Barabas implies, that he has acquired his huge fortune.
This lack of conscience links directly to his greed and self-interestedness, obvious
in the equal weight he gives to his wealth and to his daughter when he
exclaims: ‘O girl! O gold!’ This levelling comparison clearly influenced
Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice when
he had Shylock exclaim “O my ducats, O my daughter…” Barabas’s selfishness is
also evident in his asides during the conversation he has with the other Jews
in Malta. He says: ‘Assure yourselves I’ll look – unto myself.’ He cares only for himself, even bringing about the
murder of his daughter’s lover to get his revenge on Ferneze. But, in the words
of Harry Levin, these asides also serve to show Barabas’s Machiavellian
emphasis on appearance, distinguishing between ‘deeds and words.’ He hides his
true intentions from the other Maltese citizens, but treats the audience as his
confidantes and thus implicates us in his crimes.

Though we may have some
pity for Barabas in his cruel treatment by the Maltese governor and his
similarities to Job, our sympathy quickly dissipates as he develops from a
simple miser to a murderous villain. As Levin points out, Barabas ‘is a man
with a grievance, but his retaliation outruns the provocation.’ Though he may
begin as a revenger, he very quickly turns into the villain himself. This
murderousness is clear in the famous speech Barabas gives when purchasing
Ithamore as a slave: ‘As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights, / And kill sick
people groaning under walls; / Sometimes I go about and poison wells…’ Whether
these claims are true is uncertain. It’s possible that this speech is only made
in order to entice Ithamore, whom Barabas seems to have already discerned as a
villain who, like him, hates Christians. Perhaps, also, Marlowe was simply
playing on and parodying the extreme hatred for Jews in Europe. Whatever the
answer, it’s undeniable that Barabas fulfils these murderous claims – by the
end of the play, he has poisoned and killed the whole of a nunnery (including
his own daughter), caused the death of two friends, slaughtered numerous
Turkish soldiers, and much more. As the play progresses, his hands grow more bloody
and his heart blacker, becoming exactly what European society expected a Jew to
be. So it’s clear that Marlowe is playing on these early modern prejudices to
present us with the frightful image of a Jew who really only cares for himself
and his revenge.

And yet, it’s not just
Barabas who is presented as a loathsome figure – almost every character in the
play, apart from Abigail, is selfish and unsympathetic. And though we may
strongly dislike Barabas, we are watching ‘the tragedy of a Jew’ - Barabas is
our tragic hero, and to an extent we see the play from his perspective, often
taking his side against the play’s other characters. Our sympathy for Barabas
is stirred when he has his wealth seized by Ferneze the governor, under threat
of Christian conversion. During this scene, Barabas launches a succession of bitter
attacks against Christianity, beginning with the words: ‘Will you then steal my
goods? / Is theft the ground of your religion?’ Here, Barabas points out the
hypocrisy of their actions, going against the commandment ‘Thou shalt not
steal.’ When Ferneze attempts to justify the cruelty of the Christians, he
explains that Jews are infidels and that they ‘stand accursèd in the sight of
heaven.’ This idea, that the Jews are to blame for the death of Christ (the
‘first curse’) and are therefore born sinful, was a typical trope of the
period. Though the audience of the time may also have held this belief, it’s
clear that Marlowe did not, or else he would not have allowed Barabas to
respond in such cogent terms, appealing as he does to our sense of justice:
‘Shall I be tried by their transgressions? / The man that dealeth righteously
shall live…’ Though we know that Barabas is far from righteous, we still
sympathise with his argument that men should be judged according to their
actions, not according to the actions of their ancestors. This can also be read
as a Marlovian argument against the Calvinistic doctrine of Original Sin which
held that all humans are born sinful due to Adam’s fall. And so, in this
episode it is the Christians who are presented as heartless, with ‘policy’
(trickery or duplicity) as their profession, using scripture to confirm their
wrongs. Arguably, it is this unjust and hypocritical treatment that leads Barabas
to ‘make bar of no policy’ and adopt the same cruel attitude as the Christians
have towards him.

So when Barabas says to his
daughter that ‘religion / Hides many mischiefs from suspicion’ we can’t help
but agree. The Christians of Malta have used their religion to justify their
cruelty against the Jew, even though that cruelty goes against the New
Testament credo ‘Love thy neighbour.’ Marlowe also takes care to demonstrate
the vices of churchmen themselves, with Friar Jacomo and Friar Bernardine fighting
over Barabas’s wealth. They care nothing for the cleansing of his soul or for
his conversion – they care only for the goods he promises them. Indeed, Jacomo
is so covetous of Barabas’s wealth that he stabs Bernardine, a fellow
Christian. So Marlowe, here, is mocking and criticising the greed of the church
and their hypocrisy. There are numerous other instances of this throughout the
play. For example, when Abigail dies, she asks Friar Bernardine to ‘witness
that I die a Christian’ and he simply replies: ‘Ay, and a virgin, too, that
grieves me most.’ He breaks Church law when he reveals the contents of
Abigail’s dying confession, and hopes to use what she has told him as
blackmail. Once this scene has taken place, we can’t help but recall Ithamore’s
earlier question: ‘have not the nuns fine sport with the friars now and then?’

It’s clear, then, that
Christians and the Church also come under attack in this play. Indeed, the
play’s conclusion reinforces Abigail’s beautiful lament that ‘there is no love
on earth, / Pity in Jews, nor piety in Turks.’ She’s certainly right that
Ithamore (the main representative of the Turks in the play) and Barabas are
wicked. Abigail’s mistake, though, is to think there is love, pity, or piety in
the Maltese Christians, who reveal themselves to be just as sinful and scheming
as Barabas himself. Barabas is only killed at the end of the play because he is
out-manoeuvred by another schemer, Ferneze, who, despite his religion, shows no
mercifulness whatsoever at the play’s conclusion. As Barabas calls out ‘Help,
help me, Christians, help!’ and asks ‘Governor, why stand you all so pitiless?’
Ferneze explains that he has no pity for him at all, wishing to see his ‘treachery
repaid.’ Again, this demonstrates his religious hypocrisy – as a Christian, he
ought not only to forgive and show mercy, but also to see it as God’s role to
ensure justice, not his own. Thus, Ferneze abandons his religious morality
(which he seems never really to have had) and uses Barabas’s own tactics
against him. We might conclude with Levin, then, that ‘Morally, all of them
operate on the same level, and that is precisely what Marlowe is pointing out.’
Every religious group is shown to be vicious and hypocritical, and various
Christian doctrines come under attack, notably the idea that ‘Faith is not to
be held with heretics,’ which Barabas himself uses against the Christians.

What’s most interesting, though,
is that, whilst Marlowe was simply following theatrical clichés and
contemporary bigotry when he presented Barabas in such a negative light, such
an attack on Christians and Christian doctrine was rarely seen on stage.
Perhaps this goes some way to reveal Marlowe’s own religious views. Indeed, as
Paul H. Kocher suggests, Marlowe was ‘one of the most highly subjective
playwrights of his age.’ Thus, the outright criticism of Christianity in The Jew of Malta may be suggestive.
Moreover, Christianity is repeatedly questioned in Marlowe’s other works,
notably Dr Faustus. Though the play
is set within an undoubtedly Christian framework, and though Faustus is
inevitably damned for his transgressions, we cannot help sympathising and even
admiring his revolt against religion. We too desire to know the answer to
eschatological questions like ‘who made the world’ and we too appreciate human
beauty. Thus, the beautiful speeches Faustus gives cannot help inspiring our
approbation. Indeed, Faustus’s paean to Helen (‘Was this the face that launch’d a
thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’) is one of Marlowe’s
most powerful speeches, urging us to appreciate the strength of Faustus’s emotions
when he tells the spirit: ‘thou art fairer than the evening’s air.’ W.W Greg
argues that, sharing Faustus’s aesthetic appreciation, we allow ourselves to
sympathise with him. Moreover, the fact that Marlowe’s verse reaches its pinnacle
during a description of Helen, a symbol of pagan Greece, is surely indicative
of his own feelings.

We don’t have to look far
to find proof of these doubtful feelings in Marlowe’s biography. As Kocher
pointed out, criticism of religion (and Christianity specifically) seems to
have been ‘the most absorbing interest of his life.’ The first hint that
Marlowe may have had an aversion to Christianity came when, having studied at
Cambridge under an Archbishop Parker scholarship, Marlowe did not take holy
orders as expected. More convincing are the allegations of atheism that Marlowe
received a few years after his death: Baines, Aldrich, Cholmley and others all
accused Marlowe of similar crimes, largely revolving around the preaching of
atheism and the jesting at religious scripture and doctrine. Marlowe, like
Machiavelli of the prologue, seems to have seen religion as no more than a
‘childish toy’.

Hence, when Faustus says
that ‘hell’s a fable’ we cannot help recall Baines’s statement that Marlowe
‘perswades men to Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and
hobgoblins.’ And when Tamburlaine briefly comments ‘The God that sits in
heaven, if any god,’ (my italics)
it’s hard not to attribute this doubt to Marlowe himself. After all, given that
Marlowe never intended to write two parts to Tamburlaine’s story, it’s odd that
Tamburlaine is not punished for his crimes and his blasphemous aspirations in
Part 1, and it’s doubtful whether his death in Part 2 can be seen as
retributive justice rather than the natural result of mortality. Despite
killing thousands of innocents, no god punishes Tamburlaine, suggesting
Marlowe’s doubts as to whether there is any god at all. Moreover, when Barabas
jests at Christian doctrine and blasphemes against Christ (for example, by
marking his hidden jewels with a cross), it cannot escape our notice that
Marlowe probably made similar jests and blasphemous remarks during his own
lifetime, and thus that Marlowe is, to some extent, talking through Barabas. I
hope, then, that I have shown how Marlowe’s own doubts and possible atheism are
demonstrated in his work. Given the corruption of the Catholic Church in the
Early Modern period (Anthony Kenny described Pope Alexander VI as ‘the most
villainous man ever to have occupied the Roman See’), and given the oppressive
nature of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, it’s no wonder that an
intellectual like Marlowe had difficulties in accepting Christianity. Like the
characters he created, he struggled to see past the hypocrisy of churchmen, the
contradictions in religious doctrine, and the restraints that Christianity (or
indeed any religion) placed on its followers.

Tuesday, 15 August 2017

The story of the Fall is
one of opposition and conflict, centred around the battle of good and evil,
faith and temptation. Michelangelo’s Fall
of Man epitomises this opposition with its two separate depictions of Adam
and Eve. On the left, Adam and Eve are shown in the throes of temptation, about
to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; and on the right, Adam and Eve are
shown in their post-Lapsarian state, banished from Eden by the Archangel
Michael. These two opposing presentations of pre-Lapsarian and post-Lapsarian
man are divided by the evil figure of the wily serpent, the manifestation of
wickedness in the Genesis story. John Milton, in adopting this story as the
material for his epic poem, likewise adopts this emphasis on opposition and
duality, with two main conflicts highlighted throughout: firstly, and most
importantly, the conflict between good and evil, and secondly, how that
conflict manifests itself in the two different states of humankind, sinless and
then, after ‘Man’s first disobedience’, sinful. And yet, Milton’s presentation
of these conflicts is not so straightforward as we might expect – there are
ambiguities throughout. With the dubiously heroic portrayal of Satan and the
rather ominous and seemingly cruel portrayal of God, we are forced to question,
as readers, whether the line between the abstract concepts ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is
really so finite. Likewise, with the hints at sinfulness and wantonness in Eve
and in Eden before the Fall, and conversely, with the sense of man’s retained
goodness after the Fall, Milton stresses the elusiveness of sinlessness and
sinfulness, whilst also preparing us for the inevitable – first, the Fall of
Man, and second, Man’s salvation through the death of Christ. In this way,
Milton plays on these oppositions and conflicts in the poem and uses ambiguity
to increase our anticipation and thrill as readers.

The epic poem begins with
Milton declaring his intentions, to ‘assert Eternal Providence, / And justify
the ways of God to men.’ Less than ten lines later, we are introduced to Satan,
first referred to as ‘Th’infernal Serpent… whose guile’ is ‘Stirred up with
envy and revenge.’ Thus, the poem begins with the aforementioned opposition of
good and evil, the just ways of God as Milton perceives them, contrasted with the
envious deceptions of his foe, the fallen angel Lucifer. This conflict is
repeatedly emphasised in the poem – Christ is presented to us as the archetype
of goodness in whom ‘the fullness dwells of love divine,’ whilst Satan declares
his mission in completely opposing terms: ‘To do aught good never will be our
task, / But ever to do ill our sole delight, / As being the contrary to his
high will…’ This conflict between good and evil is stressed again and again, as
when Milton observes how all Satan’s malice will serve ‘but to bring forth /
Infinite goodness,’ a direct reversal of Satan’s wish to ‘out of good still to
find means of evil’. Indeed, throughout the poem, there are echoing phrases
like these that serve to recall earlier lines and give emphatic poignancy to
their contrasting sentiments. For instance, in Book I, Satan exclaims: ‘hail,
horrors, hail / Infernal world…’ whilst Book III opens with Milton’s similarly
alliterative interjection, ‘Hail holy Light.’

We might also see this
contrast in the epic poem’s contrasting elements of creation and destruction in
the poem. Whilst God (the representative of ‘good’ in the poem) is the force of
creation in Milton’s cosmos, Satan is the force of destruction – having already
‘sought / Evil to others’, he is now pictured ‘In meditated fraud and malice,
bent / On man’s destruction.’ This opposition between creation and destruction is
made particularly potent in Milton’s beautiful description of God’s creative
acts, with all aspects of this new world revelling in fresh life. For example,
the mountains heave their ‘broad bare backs’ into the clouds and the rivers
hasten ‘with glad precipitance’. When we first see Eden, it is described
(through Satan’s eyes) thus: ‘In narrow room Nature’s whole wealth, yea more, /
A Heav’n on earth, for blissful Paradise / Of God the garden was, by him in the
east / Of Eden planted…’ Here, Milton is drawing on the teleological argument
to highlight God’s goodness as it manifests itself in the beauty and harmony of
the natural world. As Helen Gardner notes, these descriptions of Edenic
splendour demonstrate God’s kindness and are ‘inspired by Milton’s passionate
belief in the goodness of the natural world as it was created and his delight
in the principle of life...’ And yet, Satan’s evil prevents him from
appreciating that beauty and goodness: he ‘Saw undelighted all delight’. I also
ought to mention briefly the contrast between Satan and Abdiel (perhaps a
manifestation of Milton himself), whose heroism we cannot help applaud as
Milton describes him: ‘Among the faithless, faithful only he; / Among
innumerable false, unmoved, / Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified…’ There is,
then, clearly an opposition created in the poem between good and evil, between
creation and destruction, and between faithfulness and faithlessness.

And yet, it’s hard to deny
that, at some points, that good/evil division becomes blurred. Indeed, though
in the first book Milton’s vocal interruptions colour our view of Satan as
evil, Satan is still one of the most charismatic and apparently heroic figures
in the poem, if not in the entirety of English literature. Who has ever read
the aphoristic line ‘Awake, arise, or be forever fall’n’ without feeling an
overwhelming sense of admiration for Satan’s heroic ambition and ‘fierce
passion’? As Hazlitt remarks, we cannot help applauding Satan and his
Promethean valour: ‘After such a
conflict as his, and such a defeat, to retreat in order, to rally, to make
terms, to exist at all, is something; but he does more than this – he founds a
new empire in hell, and from it conquers this new world…’ Satan’s charm and
irresistibility may come, in part, from the fact that his speeches were the
first of the work to be written, originally part of Milton’s plan for a
dramatic tragedy – hence, Gardner comments, ‘The intensely dramatic
handling of the figure of Satan is a main cause of the extraordinary hold he
has on the imagination.’ Moreover, we often find ourselves agreeing with
Satan’s view of God as a cruel monarch who ‘Sole reigning holds the tyranny of Heaven.’ After all, when God is
first introduced, he is seen ‘High throned above all heighth’ and he later ‘Commands all
the angels to adore him’. Given Milton’s own religiously individualist and
politically republican stances, it is no wonder, really, that he ‘wrote in
fetters when he wrote of Angels & God’ – in the words of Samuel Johnson,
Milton had an ‘envious hatred of greatness,’ ‘a sullen desire of independence’
and a ‘pride disdainful of superiority’. Thus, the beginning of the poem,
whether intentionally or not, tempts us to agree with Satan that it is ‘Better
to reign in Hell than serve in Heav’n’. The lines between good and evil are
blurred, and though we know that Satan’s speeches only ‘bore / Semblance of
worth, not substance,’ we cannot help being attracted towards him.

There
are similar oppositions in the presentation of Adam and Eve as they are seen
before and after the Fall. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve are

‘Two of far
nobler shape erect and tall,

Godlike erect…

And worthy
seemed, for in their looks divine

The image of
their glorious Maker shone,

Truth, wisdom,
sanctitude severe and pure,

Severe, but in
true filial freedom placed…’

They
are presented to us as the image of perfect innocence – even their sexuality
contains in it a certain pure nobility, repeatedly described with the word
‘mysterious’ which, in Milton’s time, had more to do with divinity than secrecy.
Indeed, Milton even defends their open sexuality, saying that ascetics and
Puritan hypocrites often defame ‘as impure what God declares / Pure, and commands
to some, leaves free to all.’ Moreover, before the Fall, there was no sense of
‘guilty shame’ or dishonour in embracing sexuality. This pre-Lapsarian
innocence is explicitly and immediately reversed after Adam and Eve eat the
divinely prohibited fruit, when they engage at once in the ‘carnal pleasure’
against which Raphael warns them in Book VIII. They are described ‘As with new
wine intoxicated both,’ the fruit inflaming in them ‘Carnal desire’. Adam casts
‘lascivious eyes’ on Eve, and ‘in lust they burn’. Likewise, Eve’s ‘eye darted
contagious fire’. These repeated references to heat and fire highlight not only
the sensuous and wanton nature of these desires, they also recall the burning
fires of Pandemonium, and thus implicitly link this sexual depravity to the
evil of Satan. And it’s not just in their sexuality that their post-Fall
corruption reveals itself – they also grow blasphemous and proud, ‘and fancy
that they feel / Divinity within them breeding wings…’ After eating the fruit,
Eve even contemplates how the fruit may ‘render me more equal, and perhaps, / A
thing not undesirable, sometime / Superior; for inferior who is free?’ The
final question here again recalls Satan’s rhetoric when, in Book V, he
questions how unequals can really be free. Not long after, the two are filled
with ‘high passions, anger, hate, / Mistrust, suspicion, discord, and shook
sore / Their inward state of mind, calm region once / And full of peace, now
tossed and turbulent.’ Thus, Milton is keen to highlight the immediate change
in his two human protagonists after they commit their first sin.

But there are ambiguities
in this shift, too. Even before the fall, there are suggestions of sin and
wantonness in both Eden and in man, prophetic suggestions of what is to come.
This is largely insinuated through Milton’s descriptions of Eve’s hair, and as
Jason Scott-Warren argues, ‘Milton makes Eve’s naturally curly hair indirectly
responsible for the Fall of Man.’ Eve’s hair is described as ‘Disheveld, but in
wanton ringlets wav’d, / As the Vine curles her tendrils’. This directly links
Eve with the serpent, who is described as both ‘sly’ and ‘insinuating’ even
before Satan has adopted the serpent’s form (demonstrating the evil already
present in Eden before the Fall). The word ‘insinuating’, as Scott-Warren
points out, comes from the Latin word ‘sinuare’ (notably containing the word
‘sin’) which means ‘to bend’ or ‘to curl’, thus linking Eve’s curling tresses
to the serpent’s curling body. Thus, we are here given a premonition of Eve’s
temptation and her eventual sin, highlighted in the word ‘wanton’ as used to
describe her ‘ringlets wav’d’. This word is also used to describe the trees of
the garden, which require ‘More hands than ours to lop their wanton growth…’
And finally, the river of Eden is described as curving and curling in ‘mazie
error’. All of this combines to insinuate from our very first sighting of Eden
that sin and the possibility of sin is indeed already present, despite the
apparently innocent purity of Adam and Eve.

Milton also highlights the
retained goodness in Adam and Eve even after their fall – unlike Satan, who
knows there is ‘no place / Left for repentance’, Adam and Eve commit themselves
to penitence and remorse. Milton describes how they ‘fell / Before him
reverent, and both confessed / Humbly their faults, and pardon begged, with
tears / Watering the ground, and with their sighs the air / Frequenting, sent
from hearts contrite, in sign / Of sorrow unfeigned, and humiliation meek.’
This repentance is wholly ‘unfeigned’, distinct from Satan’s false and
superficial protestations of sorrow in Milton’s sequel, Paradise Regained. As Johnson says, Adam and Eve are ‘amiable’
after the Fall ‘for repentance and submission.’ But it is not just in their
repentance that we sympathise with them. It is also in the pure and wholly
virtuous love that they show towards one another – for example, they both wish
they could take all the punishment on themselves (Eve wishes ‘that all / The
sentence from thy head removed may light / On me’). But it is Milton’s
beautiful expression of their love that leaves us most sympathetic: Adam says
to Eve, ‘How can I live without thee, how forgo / Thy sweet converse and love
so dearly joined, / To live again in these wild woods forlorn? / Should God
create another Eve, and I / Another rib afford, yet loss of thee / Would never
from my heart…’ Eve reflects these sentiments when she tells Adam in such
honourable terms, ‘thou to me / Art all things under Heav’n…’ Thus, as Waldock
argues, we cannot help sympathising here, not only because they are now
imperfect, mortal humans like us, but also because they are ‘following here the
highest moral value we know – Love.’ And finally, we can only admire their
dignity in accepting the loss of their paradise and embracing the ‘Paradise
within’ as they ‘Through Eden took their solitary way.’

So it’s clear that Milton
was keen, in this poem, to employ established oppositions and conflicts, whilst
also manipulating them and making us question their validity. Just as Satan and
God are held up against each other and yet both presented relatively ambiguously,
so pre- and post-Fall humanity are explicitly contrasted though depicted in a
nuanced way, with both sin and honour present before and after the Fall. Milton
did this for a number of reasons, but it is largely due to the fact that the
story of Paradise Lost was
universally known, so Milton plays games with this idea of foreknowledge
throughout. Satan is presented as tempting and almost admirable in Book I not
only as an indication of Eve’s later temptation and seduction, but also as a
warning to us to demonstrate how easy it is to be charmed by rhetoric, thus
encouraging us to sympathise with Eve in her Fall.

In the same way, the
descriptions of Eden and pre-Lapsarian Adam and Eve are littered with subtle
insinuations of their future wantonness, thus preparing us for the Fall that we
know is already inevitable. Because we’ve been prepared for the event by all
these subtle references to sin, the simple climax of the poem needs no
adornment to give it weight: ‘So saying, her rash hand in evil hour / Forth
reaching to the Fruit, she pluck’d, she eat…’ As Gardner points out, ‘When at
last we come to it, with the weight of the poem behind it, the undramatic
presentation of this simple act of disobedience is profoundly dramatic.’ And
finally, Adam and Eve are shown to retain their goodness after the Fall in
order to prepare the Christian reader for what was to come – not only the
goodness of Noah and Moses, but more importantly, the redemption and salvation
of man through Christ’s death, as narrated by Michael. It is perhaps in this
sense that Coleridge referred to Milton as ‘the deity of prescience,’ in that
Milton is recounting a story that all his readers knew, and thus he fills it
throughout with portentous and fateful hints to add to the story’s unfolding excitement.
So, by blurring these traditional lines of opposition, Milton not only
surprises his readers, he also makes his poem more dramatically effective. He
has indeed fulfilled his wish that he might ‘leave something so written to after-times,
as they should not willingly let it die.’